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In this talk, Professor David Nash and Professor Anne-Marie Kilday will discuss their book Shame and Modernity in Britain: 1890 to the Present.

The book argues that traditional images and practices associated with shame did not recede with the coming of modern Britain. Following on from the authors’ acclaimed work, Cultures of Shame, this monograph looks at shame in the modern era; investigating how current social and cultural expectations in war and peace, changing attitudes to sexual identities and sexual behaviour, new innovations in media, and changing representations of reputation, all became sites for the reconstruction of 20th Century styles of shame.

Using a suite of detailed micro-histories, the book examines 20th Century sites of shame including conceptions of cowardice/conscientious objection during the First World War, fraud and clerical scandal in the interwar years, the repeated redefinition of shame associated with both abortion and sexual behaviour, shoplifting in the 1980s and, lastly, the shifting perception of homosexuality - from ‘Coming Out’ to embracing ‘Pride’, and, finally, rediscovering the positivity of shame with the birth of the ‘Queer’.